Andrea Dietrich's Blog

About Andrea Dietrich

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Andrea Dietrich grew up in Iowa and now resides in Utah with a spouse and two cats. She has two grown children and three grandchildren. Having graduated BYU with a Spanish major/ESL minor, she has spent most of her adult life teaching. It wasn't until 2000 that she began writing in earnest and discovering her "niche" as a writer of lyrical poetry. The internet opened up a new world for her, and she has spent nearly a decade now participating in poetry clubs, acting as a judge of poetry contests for various magazines and for the website Shadow Poetry, and also, entering poetry contests herself.

Ms. Dietrich has won numerous awards, as well as the title Poet of the Year 2008, from the Yahoo group, Poetry For Thought. In addition, she has won prizes from the magazines Lucidity, Bell's Letters, Art with Words, Poets at Work and SP Quill, the magazine for which she wrote grammar and poetry articles as well as movie reviews and for which she acted as poetry editor for the head editor Marie Summers for six years. Many of her poems have appeared in Shadows Ink, a yearly published series of chapbooks of award winning poetry as well as in numerous other anthologies. Her short stories appeared in many issues of SP Quill and much of her poetry is published in eight chapbooks (the most recent one soon to be published is called Prosies), which can be purchased at Shadowpoetry.com.

PLEASE check your acrostic poems/ Tidy up spelling, etc.

Blog Posted:7/13/2014 11:41:00 AM

I just read the entries to my acrostic contest. I am seeing some standout poems. Also I am seeing some very nice ones that have different kinds of errors, such as spelling "it's" as "its" or using verbs when they should use noun forms,and vice versa, or ending every phrase with a period even when there is a sentence that is not completed, or conversely not using puncuation at all, but making lines that seem to run on, so I can't tell where some thoughts end and the next ones begin. These are just a few examples of types of errors that caught my attention this morning.

Also, a few of the poems had lines so long that they dropped down into the next line, making it look like the poem was not an acrostic after all. Please consider format too when presenting an acrostic poem! I need some advice from my friend judges out there. Should I be a bit strict on this one? Or should I break my own rules asking that people take care with grammar and spelling and give lots of placements anyway? I am almost tempted to do a winners' list shorter than my usual list. In that case, I want everyone to know that it does not mean I did not like your poem. I just wanted to have some well crafted poems appear on the winners' list! (to include taking care with spelling and other things that I feel should matter to us as writers).

If you wrote an acrostic for my contest, I hope you will take a moment to look over your creation. I think I should just stick to my guns and not place the poems with at least more than one obvious error in them .Always look over a poem you write after you finish it. The editing process is so useful! And make sure your format shows off your poem clearly as an Acrostic! Thanks, guys. Hopefully I will have time to finish judging this one during the week. Right now I have other things to get doing!!! Happy Sunday. All.

I'm with you on this, andrea, it drives me crackers too! sloppy grammar and spelling sends out a message (to me anyway) that the poet doesn't really care about his/her work...having said that, I will (and frequently do) bend my own rules in my contests to accommodate a poem that is very good, and if english isn't the first language I make allowances for that...my own grammar is by no means 100% accurate, but glaring errors are not good!

Ok, I will try!! I have really high expectations on some things that I think some people are not even aware of. For example, some people use forms of their words incorrectly and I fear that some of it is because English is not their native language. It gets tough knowing where to draw the line. A top ten would work great but many nice ones would be left off!!